Anti-piracy bill meets Web-freedom backlash

I’m not surprised that big tech companies aren’t supporting this bill. This would mean that they could be legally liable for users posting copyrighted material to their sites. What does that mean? They’d have to spend more money policing it, or come up with some magic thing that detects copyrighted material. It seems like the main focus of this bill is against pirated movies. In theory, an advanced image recognition algorithm could be made to screen any content uploaded to a site for known copyrighted material. A centralized database of material would of course have to be made, but I’m sure the movie industry would foot the bill for that if it meant more net profits because their movies were not being pirated.

I have a thought about the increased sales though. I would gander that most pirating is done by people that wouldn’t otherwise go see the movie, or pay for cable service to watch the music videos. They’re not all of the sudden going to go spend the money to pay for it legally. If they don’t have the money, they’ll just find something else to do. Either that or they’ll get more deeply involved with pirating and get their content from countries that this bill would not be able to touch. The only true way for the movie industry to protect their assets would be to monitor all the sites that give their content out after the bill is passed. There would probably be a clause in the bill that would allow the movie industry to then go to ISP’s and say that they can’t serve those websites to their customers.

This is where the most opposition is coming in. The fact that this will censor the internet, something that the free-speech activists won’t allow to happen without waging war. So in my opinion, this bill will never pass, and the movie industry will need to take another approach to protecting their content. Maybe they should invest in my image recognition algorithm If only it existed any other way than in my brain!